Category Archives: Heritage

‘Self-satisfied pork butcher’: Shakespeare grave effigy believed to be definitive likeness

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Exclusive: Bust in Holy Trinity church was modelled by tomb-maker Nicholas Johnson, research finds

They say you should never meet your heroes, which has been just as well for literature fans who for centuries have been told they would never see an accurate likeness of William Shakespeare.

Until recently, there were only two definitive portraits of the playwright widely regarded to be the greatest writer in the English language and both were thought to have been painted posthumously. Art critics have even argued that the most famous – the Cobbe portrait – was more likely to have been a painting of courtier Sir Thomas Overbury, not the Bard at all.

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Wipe wallpaper with white bread? It works, says English Heritage

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List of historical cleaning methods includes using milk on flagstones but advises against rubbing potatoes on paintings

Do consider using skimmed milk on a flagstone floor, or fresh white bread on wallpaper, heritage experts confidently advise. But please do not follow the advice of housekeepers who used potatoes to clean oil paintings, or Worcestershire sauce to polish the silver.

As some people prepare for a spring clean, English Heritage has revealed some of its best historical cleaning tips – and the worst.

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Boris Johnson rules out return of Parthenon marbles to Greece

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Prime minister says sculptures taken by Lord Elgin would remain in Britain as they had been legally acquired

Boris Johnson has used his first interview with a European newspaper since becoming the UK’s prime minister to issue a point-blank rejection of the Parthenon marbles being returned to Greece.

Johnson insisted that the sculptures, removed from the monument by Lord Elgin in circumstances that have since spurred one of the world’s most famous cultural rows, would remain in Britain because they had been legally acquired.

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Bronze age burial site in Spain suggests women were among rulers

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Researchers in Murcia find exquisite objects at women’s graves later used as sites for elite warrior burials

A burial site found in Spain – described by archaeologists as one of the most lavish bronze age graves discovered to date in Europe – has sparked speculation that women may have been among the rulers of a highly stratified society that flourished on the Iberian peninsula until 1550BC.

Since 2013, a team of more than a dozen researchers have been investigating the site of La Almoloya in the southern Spanish region of Murcia.

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How pandemic may finally sink Kashmir’s famous houseboats

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Building and repair ban had turned Dal Lake into graveyard for sinking boats even before coronavirus and Delhi crackdown

Ghulam Nabi Butt may be 90 years old, but he has never forgotten the three days that George Harrison came to stay on his houseboat in October 1966.

It was here, on one of Butt’s first historic Clermont houseboats moored on the northern bank of Dal Lake in Srinagar, Kashmir, that the Beatles lead guitarist met the Indian musician and composer Ravi Shankar and was taught to play the sitar – marking the beginning of an musical collaboration that would last decades.

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Vive la Commune? The working-class insurrection that shook the world

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As Paris prepares to commemorate the 150th anniversary, the communards’ vision of a new form of radical democracy is once again dividing France

A couple of years ago, as railway workers demonstrated in Paris against proposed government reforms, a banner in the crowd offered a blast from France’s revolutionary past: “We don’t care about May ’68,” read its slogan. “We want 1871.”

It was a message that the protesters meant business. These days, the students’ revolt of 1968, and its injunctions to “Be realistic … demand the impossible”, are remembered with fond nostalgia. But in the annals of French revolutionary upheavals, the memory of the Paris Commune of 1871 and its bloody barricades has a darker, edgier status. “Unlike 1789, the Commune was never truly integrated into the national story,” says Mathilde Larrère, a historian specialising in the radical movements of 19th-century France. Wild, anarchic and dominated by the Parisian poor, the Commune was loathed by the liberal bourgeoisie as well as by the conservatives and monarchists of the right. Its savage suppression by the French army, and its own acts of brutal violence, created wounds that never healed. “The Commune of 1871 didn’t become part of a consensual collective memory,” says Larrère. In respectable society, it was viewed as beyond the pale.

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Will the ‘Sistine Chapel’ of pelota bounce back as a centre of Spanish culture?

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Campaigners call for historic sports venue in Madrid to become a world heritage site after its €38m restoration

Beneath a pale-blue late-winter sky, and behind an elegant but unassuming facade, one of Madrid’s great unsung survivors sits waiting, once more, for news of the latest in a long and improbable series of metamorphoses.

Since its inauguration 127 years ago, the Frontón Beti-Jai, built at the height of the Spanish capital’s love affair with the Basque game of pelota, has echoed with the crack of leather-stitched balls, with cheers, screams, the thrill of invention, the gunning of thirsty American engines and, most recently, the chirping of the birds who nested in its almost terminal decay.

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‘An eyesore’: thousands protest against Spanish cathedral’s new doors

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Planned update to Burgos Cathedral prompts online petition signed by more than 31,000 people

Plans to mark the 800th anniversary of Burgos’s magnificent gothic cathedral with three enormous new bronze doors have ushered in an unholy row, with Unesco advising against the project and critics attacking the €1.2m portals as an “artistic outrage”.

Cathedral authorities in the northern Spanish city say the new doors, designed by the renowned, award-winning artist Antonio López, are a work of contemporary art that will complement “a monument already rendered in five artistic styles that are the fruit of each stage of its eight centuries”. They also point out that the current wooden doors are old and in a poor state of repair.

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Can Addis Ababa stop its architectural gems being hidden under high-rises?

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While Ethiopia’s ancient sites are valued, urban heritage is an afterthought in a city forced to expand ever upwards

Only rubble remains of the former home of Dejazmatch Asfaw Kebede, a member of Emperor Haile Selassie’s government. Built in the early 1900s, and inspired by Indian as well as Ethiopian architecture, the building was demolished in early January without the knowledge of Addis Ababa’s conservation agency, the Culture and Tourism Bureau.

Demolition and reconstruction are now the most common sights along Addis Ababa’s unrecognisably altered skeleton skyline. The collateral damage is the city’s heritage.

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‘We want our riches back’ – the African activist taking treasures from Europe’s museums

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Mwazulu Diyabanza has been fined and jailed for entering museums and forcibly removing ‘pillaged’ African artefacts. He tells our writer why the British Museum is now in his sights

Mwazulu Diyabanza makes no secret of why he is in France. If coronavirus had not closed most of Europe’s museums, the Congolese activist would probably be inside one right now, wresting African objects from their displays to highlight what he sees as the mass pillaging of the continent by European colonialists.

And it’s not just the mighty museums. Diyabanza and his supporters also plan to include smaller galleries, private collections and auction houses in their campaign. “Wherever the riches of our heritage and culture have been stolen,” says the 42-year-old, “we will intervene.” As the leader of a pan-African movement called Yanka Nku (Unity, Dignity and Courage), Diyabanza is on a mission is to recover all works of art and culture taken from Africa to Europe. He calls his method “active diplomacy”.

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Out of the dark ages: Netflix film The Dig ignites ballyhoo about Sutton Hoo

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Archaeologists at British Museum and National Trust report surge in interest in 1939 Anglo-Saxon find

It was when she spotted #SuttonHoo trending on Twitter that Sue Brunning knew this was not going to be just like any other week.

As the curator of the early medieval collection at the British Museum, and the guardian of the spectacular Sutton Hoo treasures, Brunning is well used to fielding interest in what are justly some of the museum’s best loved exhibits.

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Kyrgyzstan ballads, Okinawan folk, Ugandan hymns … the album rewriting global music history

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Excavated Shellac rejects the western canon of pop, rock, jazz, classical and more to champion 78rpm gems from overlooked corners of the world – ‘an alternate universe’, according to the man behind it

Imagine an anthology of 20th-century music making that purposely ignored pop, rock, jazz, blues, country, classical and opera. Cue outrage, at least from English-speaking listeners. But away from the western canon that has come to dominate our conception of music-making, much of the world was busy creating swathes of very different, extremely beautiful music.

These overlooked styles are collated on a new 100-track compilation, An Alternate History of the World’s Music, and presumptuous as it may seem to announce that the best album of 2021 has already been released, to my mind it’s unlikely it will be topped. Helmed by Dust-to-Digital, the US label that has done a magnificent job with box sets chronicling overlooked areas of pre-second world war music, the digital release also features a 186-page ebook (complete with beautiful illustrations like the ones here), in which every tune gets discussed – the first is a South African miner’s protest against police brutality, the last a sultry Cuban dance tune whose singers sound like they might have been hitting the rum while recording. This sonic smorgasbord from across the globe lives up to the provocative title, with music from Afghanistan, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, Uganda, Spain, Albania, Mongolia, Mexico and elsewhere. Ever wondered what the Crimean Tartar Orchestra might sound like? Well, their raucous, minor key, brass party music is fabulous.

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No true ‘city of culture’ should dishonour the bold ideals of its postwar rebirth

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Plans for the centre of Coventry claim to offer a sense of place, but ignore its pioneering mid-century reconstruction

Coventry is UK City of Culture 2021, a title that focuses attention on its contribution to the cultural life of the nation: 1980s two-tone music, the legend of Lady Godiva, and its role in the development of the bicycle and car industries. And, high on this list, the fact that it was the pre-eminent example of reconstruction after wartime bombing.

Among the most devastated cities, Coventry was also one of the most determined and thoughtful in its reconstruction. This was partly expressed by its new cathedral, which brought together leading art and architecture, and connected movingly with the ruins of its predecessor. It was also expressed by the city centre, rebuilt as a series of human-scaled, pedestrian-friendly precincts. Here, too, the idea was for art and architecture to work together.

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Battle for Brixton’s soul as billionaire Texan DJ plans 20-storey tower block

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Residents vow to stop Taylor McWilliams’s scheme to develop a site that looms over the famous Electric Avenue street market

The outcome of the fight may help shape London’s future skyline. In one corner is a Texan millionaire DJ and property developer who has put forward plans for a 20-storey office block in Brixton, next to a conservation area and the district’s famous Electric Avenue.

Taylor McWilliams’s property company Hondo, which owns most of Brixton market, claims the proposal will “deliver” 2,000 jobs in the area and generate £2.8m every year for the local economy.

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Blueprint for Biden? How a struggling Irish town gambled on its links to JFK

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New Ross reinvented itself as a shrine to the Kennedy clan. Can towns linked to Biden, the most Irish American president since JFK, do the same?

After its factories died and its port withered, New Ross, a town perched by the River Barrow in south-east Ireland, decided in the 1990s to tap a unique asset: John F Kennedy.

The US president’s great-grandfather had sailed from the quays of New Ross to America during the 1840s famine, leaving behind a modest homestead that JFK twice visited, including a few months before his assassination in 1963. Like many Americans, not least the current US president-elect, Joe Biden, Kennedy was proud of his Irish connections and keen to re-emphasise the links.

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Saunas to sourdough: Unesco updates culture heritage list

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Thirty-five entries from around the world added to 2020 list of national traditions

Sauna culture in Finland, sourdough making in Malta, Budima dancing in Zambia and a grass mowing competition in Bosnia and Herzegovina have been added to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s prestigious list of intangible cultural heritage.

The entries were among the 35 from around the world added to the list for 2020, and also included the tradition of playing the hunting horn, a status awarded jointly to Italy, France, Belgium and Luxembourg, as well as the art of glass bead making.

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Fit for a king: true glory of 1,000-year-old cross buried in Scottish field is revealed at last

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Part of the Galloway Hoard, found in 2014, the piece is so spectacular it may have belonged to a monarch

A spectacular Anglo-Saxon silver cross has emerged from beneath 1,000 years of encrusted dirt following painstaking conservation. Such is its quality that whoever commissioned this treasure may have been a high-standing cleric or even a king.

It was a sorry-looking object when first unearthed in 2014 from a ploughed field in western Scotland as part of the Galloway Hoard, the richest collection of rare and unique Viking-age objects ever found in Britain or Ireland, acquired by the National Museums Scotland (NMS) in 2017.

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George Clooney: Why we owe our domestic bliss to … Boris Johnson

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Row over Parthenon marbles deflected attention from secret courtship with wife Amal, star reveals

George Clooney will not be sending Boris Johnson a Christmas card, but he may send a thank-you note to No 10 – along with a comb, he told the Observer this weekend.

The Hollywood film star and director has recognised he owes part of his current domestic contentment and job satisfaction to a strange run-in he had with the prime minister early in 2014, while Clooney was secretly courting his future wife, Amal.

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Remarkable story of Madagascar’s last queen emerges from Surrey attic

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Auctioneer pieces together poignant tale of Ranavalona III from satin court dress and box of mementos

It began with a fabulous 19th-century dress and a box of jumbled photographs cleared out of a Guildford attic before a move to the country. It has resulted in being able to tell the true, poignant story of Ranavalona III, the last queen of Madagascar.

Ranavalona’s remarkable life of can be revealed thanks to the auction this week of personal effects unearthed by a descendent of Clara Herbert, who worked for the Madagascan royal family from the 1890s to the 1920s.

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Nazi art dispute goes to US supreme court in landmark case

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Heirs of Jewish art dealers bring case over Guelph Treasure that defence lawyers say could open floodgates

A 12-year wrangle over a rare collection of medieval ecclesiastical art sold by Jewish art dealers to the Nazis in 1935 will arrive in front of the highest court in the US on Monday, in a landmark case defence lawyers say could open the floodgates for restitution battles from all over the world to be fought via the US.

The supreme court will hear oral arguments on whether the dealers’ heirs can sue in US courts to retrieve the church reliquaries, known as the Guelph Treasure or Welfenschatz, from Germany.

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